NEW YEAR'S REVOLUTION

NEW YEAR’S REVOLUTION

New Year’s Day 2018

By Shana Smith

Today—January 1, 2018—the Earth has traveled 600 million miles in 365 days, just to get exactly to the same point it started from. Year after year, it just keeps coming back home, which is at any given point on this infinitely orbiting sphere. This dance between Earth and Sun gives us life and breath.

Revolution. Today, New Year’s Day, the Earth has revolved one more time fully around the Sun. Tomorrow, it will greet last year’s same point in full circle, and then begin again. Like the Zen Enso, it’s path is totally complete and just beginning at the same time. Its journey is finished only to start all over again. In reality, this revolution is independent of time: it could be the birth of a moment, a stage of life, a generation, a millisecond, a month, a century.

Inhale. There is nothing but absolute fullness and absolute potential in every breath. Exhale. There it is: perfect expression of your verified presence and experience in this grand existence. The circle of breath, in and out, the circle of life and death, the expansion and contraction of every vibrating particle in this universe—so it is that we revolve and orbit our own light, our own essence, closer and closer and closer…turning ever inward to see the Sun…until we realize that there is nothing to orbit, no one to do the orbiting. Only revolution. Only This.

May your New Year be always and ever new, may you revolve into each and every moment’s great gift with gratitude, may you know the great eastern Sun as your very Self, and see it clearly in all beings. May the resolution of suffering and the manifestation of peace, harmony and justice we wish to see in the outer world begin with the gentle revolving inward into Self Love.

Shinnen omidetoo gozaimasu, Feliz Ano Nuevo. Hauoli no Makahiki Hau. Bonne annee. Mwaka mpya wenye furaha. Nov varsh ki shubhakamanaen. Am gedid said. Xīn nián kuài lè. Happy New Year!